Weaving the Ways of the World

In the little city of Santa Fe, a city of many museums, the Museum of International Folk Art has always been both at the top of the hill and considered top of the heap. Since it opened in 1953, the building has spread across a ridge and grown to accommodate the huge Girard Foundation Collection of 106,000 objects in 1979 and the Hispanic Heritage Wing in 1995.

On Saturday, this storehouse of humble handmade objects will significantly expand its international collection, thanks to a major gift from the Neutrogena Corp. and its founder, Lloyd Cotsen. Although this new two-story facility will be called the Neutrogena Wing, it was constructed inside the existing building’s atrium and consequently is located at the very heart of the museum.

The folk art museum has always been unabashedly about delight, with laughter encouraged. The horror vacuii Girard installation of some 10,000 objects arranged in polyglot vignettes is often hilarious and grows more so as time passes. Scenarios of, say, heaven and hell, or a motorcycle race, are conglomerations of toys from different cultures in different materials and different scales that now seem like crafty prototypes of artist Chris Burden’s “A Tale of Two Cities.”

The Neutrogena Wing builds on this whimsy but seamlessly adds grandeur by means of its elegant installation--it was designed as a processional through degrees of intimacy, opening with a couple of disarming one-liners. In the sky-lit foyer, Susan Bowman’s jaunty life-sized “Ray and Elsie” (1980s) is draped upon a bench; suspended overhead is a brightly painted, impossibly elongated prop airplane with female passengers whose Marge Simpson hair is bent by the wind, while male passengers sport unaffected vertical top hats.

The main installation is housed in a gallery with subdued lighting that draws a viewer from one pool of illumination to another. The first is actually an elevated ersatz pond of a dozen or so alligators from around the world, arranged to slither past one another across a surface of broken glass.

While the Neutrogena gallery continues the Girard theme of mingling artifacts from many cultures, the installation plays up the specific structural and textural qualities distinctive to each piece. Rather than the boisterous open-air market conviviality of the Girard Wing, the new installation presents the beauty and rarity of individual items both subtly and dramatically.

Who knew that 19th century Chinese thermal underwear could be so interesting, let alone so exquisite? Illuminated from behind, an openwork mesh garment intricately constructed of bamboo stems shimmers. In juxtaposition to this unusual textile is a translucent parka from Alaska made of walrus-gut strips bejeweled with orange puffin beaks and small feathers. Nearby is a cluster of these weatherproof parkas, or kamleikas, both undecorated and ceremonial, made in the 19th century by the Yupik people of St. Lawrence Island. If Robert Morris were to make walrus-gut parkas, they might look like one here with black and red threads sewn at intervals along the seams.

Textiles are the glory and strength of this collection. As Mary Hunt Kahlenberg, collection curator and advisor for 19 years to Cotsen, observed: It makes sense that a man who built up a small family soap business into a worldwide success, whose main product is meant to caress the skin, should respond to the sensuality and intimacy of textiles.

One of the most sensually voluptuous garments on display here is an early 20th century Japanese bridal robe. This beautifully decorated silk Uchikake--which literally means drape--is a discreet and cool gray on the outside, while inside a brilliant party scene blooms forth in shades of salmon and red. Five mythical elf-like creatures cheerfully dance and drink around a huge pot of hot sake. Cranes in flight symbolizing longevity and chrysanthemums in full bud surround the party.

According to an essay in the catalog, samurai ladies during the Edo Period (1603-1868) reacted to a government ban on expensive kimonos by developing a taste for such luxurious linings. At the time of its making, only the craftsperson, the bride and eventually the groom would have known about the inside scene on this kimono.

This wedding kimono extends the Japanese aesthetic belief that concealed and hidden beauty is more potent and resounding than what is blatant. This play between the ribald and the restrained, the inside and the outside takes on life-and-death dimensions with another group of Japanese garments, padded firefighters’ jackets and pants. All are displayed inside-out since the outside of these indigo quilted textiles carries only the fireman’s name and station identification. On the inside, however, are painted allegorical scenes of ferocity, courage and protection.

In the realm of textiles, it can be argued that the most refined and varied practice of the art was achieved in pre-Columbian South America. Calling a Nazca textile a tunic or a Wari textile a hat is like calling a Caravaggio painting a picture. The Neutrogena installation features a mind-boggling

AD 600-900 Peruvian textile, stunning for its color design and technique. With colors as sharp and fresh as if it were made yesterday, this bold tie-dyed tunic dazzles with circus-like energy.

Hats are another special group of items collected by Cotsen. They are installed and illuminated here in a manner that bounces the viewer back and forth between hats and hair: Hats that look like cornrow hair, hats that extend the hair into towers of plaited delicacy, hats that look like echoes or halos of hairstyles and openwork hats made of horsehair. Considering today’s architectural haircuts and neon-dyed dreadlocks, this aesthetic relationship between hats and hair is still alive and well in our high schools and on our streets.

About 200 objects are featured in this inaugural exhibition, the first of three fully designed installations scheduled for the next five years. Cotsen is determined that his collection be accessible, thus the lower level of the Neutrogena Wing is an open storage facility. Cotsen nixed offers to create an interactive video, insisting that the public be greeted by a friendly human who physically handles and demonstrates the materials. During the preview, a multicolor textile was on view through a video microscope that enlarged the weave of every tiny thread to the size of rope.

Cotsen made it a condition of his gift that 80% of the 2,600 objects be accessible during the first five years. This, too, may have been another legacy of the Girard Collection, more than 80% of which remains unseen in storage. The Neutrogena Wing open storage facility subverts the guardian syndrome inherent to museums and nicely inverts the usual behind-the-curtain curatorial operations into a veritable fishbowl, where all research and conservation are observable.

Cotsen studied archeology as an undergraduate at Princeton and clearly has a great respect for the inventiveness of traditional cultures. Yet, neither his collections nor his methods of sharing them appear to be bound by hierarchy and tradition. When most museums’ textile collections are either encased in glass and hard to see, or locked away and frozen to prevent any deterioration, this collection is presented so as to be palpable, tangible and fully perceptible.

Cotsen is a man of commerce and a man of the world who sees the intelligence in the objects he has collected as pertinent to our lives. The innovations and brilliance of distant cultures have been more than accumulated; they are respected and celebrated.

Cotsen began collecting as a child with matchbook covers, and his business acumen and good fortune eventually provided the means for him to fill his corporate headquarters with objects of affection and fascination from around the world. The collection was installed at Neutrogena much as it is at the museum, with both humor and grandeur. He thought that the ingenuity he saw in these objects would build a culturally alert, reflective, problem-solving and competitive work force. In his partnership with the Museum of International Folk Art, Cotsen has found an institution less burdened with traditions than an archeological museum or an art museum. His collection blurs the lines between the two.

With the addition of the Neutrogena Wing, the folk art museum will continue to be at the top of the hill, at the top of the heap.

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“THE EXTRAORDINARY IN THE ORDINARY,” Museum of International Folk Art, 2000 at the Museum Plaza, Camino Lejo, off Old Santa Fe Trail. Dates: Opens Saturday. Tuesdays to Sundays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Ends March 2000. Price: $5. Phone: (505) 827-6350.